To cheers of totalitarian art: some of it's good, and the rest is ripe for mocking.

Reason | August 1, 2003| | Copyright

The propaganda art of totalitarian countries falls into three rough categories. At the lowest level, there are the ubiquitous portraits of the Beloved Leader--Stalin, Mao, Kim II sung--that come bundled with a personality cult. A small step up from that are the kitschy orthodoxies of socialist realism and Nazi architecture: iconic, "heroic," and never, ever degenerate.

And then there's the genuinely inventive stuff. Authoritarianism and individual expression do not generally walk arm in arm, but there have been times and places where they did: in the Soviet cinema ...

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